"ike Wile E. Coyote salivating over a "4000 Ways To Prepare Roadrunner" cookbook without watching his surroundings, the Road Runner of Societal Inertia snuck up on them both and beepbeeped them off the mesa."
--Shem

He totally is. And so are his companies. Apparently Tesla Solar (nee SolarCity) is really tanking, and was tanking before being "bought out" by Tesla. Tesla cars is also now losing their per vehicle subsidy (since they've sold enough vehicles), and there's still a lot of skepticism about their actual construction, with them "certifying" 5000 cars in one week by constructing them in tents and certifying #5000 at 4 AM on Sunday. Noone will be surprised if they drop back down under 3000 cars per week for an indefinite future. Basically, all of Musk's promises are coming back to him, and there's less excuse making that's got traction now.

Musk has always been an overpromising asshole. Both Hyperloop and the Boring Company are things that basically can't work. It's not quite to the level of "I'm going to found a company to design a perpetual motion machine. Some haters doubt me, but I believe in the power of technology and engineering ingenuity." But it's close.

Tesla and SpaceX are both things that actually could be done, so they were more successful. But Tesla is now at the point where the main challenges are boring grunt work like hammering out a supply chain and optimizing the assembly line by .2%. And that doesn't seem to be what Musk is interested in in any way.

Yeah, the thing has always been that he promises stuff that nobody could deliver on, then when he doesn't deliver on half of it, it's "Well, nobody could do that." But his problems have been that he's promised things that 1) other companies do and 2) are things that his companies definitely NEED to do. 5000 cars per week is a huge one. And he's now been putting that off for about a year, and distracting people with "Hey look, a flamethrower! Hey look, a semi-truck! Hey look, a new roadster!" But now the real money behind his company is starting to be like "Hey, that's all cool, but where's my car? Where's my profitability? And that completely self-serving SolarCity move did NOT help his reputation among those folks at all. Everyone saw it for what it was: A bailout of his badly failing company by his not-yet-failing company to (not really) hide the fact that it was failing.

Come on, no one has figured out how to mass produce cars yet.

his voice is so soothing, but why do conspiracy nuts always sound like Batman and Robin solving one of Riddler's puzzles out loud? - fod

I occasionally forget that Tesla is a borderline scam since there are so many Model S sedans on the road here. If 50% of the US sales are California, Phoenix must make up about 35% of sales. If I'm out and about, I see many of them.

We live in the fucked age. Get used to it. - dhex

holy shit there will never be an end until the sweet release of death (as dictated by the death panels, natch) - lunch

It really is a solid car, it's just being held hostage by the same "I'll get where I'm going by being an asshole, not by accommodating even a little bit" Silicon Valley spirit that's made Uber into such a tire fire. Perfect example; they spent all that time trying to fight dealerships because they didn't want to join the old guard. Which, to be fair, is a particularly stifling cartel system, especially on a local level. It's also a proven way to sell cars, something that the CEO of an auto manufacturing company should probably be interested in, especially when he's already got a million other battles he has to carry out to roll out an entirely new technology with pretty much no infrastructure. But nope, let's spend years fighting and wind up with a few dealerships in each state. He'd rather be known as a failure who took an old world down with him than as a success who made compromises when he had to. Hence, the Bond villain.

"VOTE SHEMOCRACY! You will only have to do it once!" -Loyalty Officer Aresen

Look, all I want to do is drive a zero-emission Tesla, stop at a Theranos diagnostic center for some routine bloodwork on my way to work, then go sell real estate on a valuation commensurate with WeWork's market value per square foot. And use my earnings to buy a ticket into space so I can participate in a Space Opera fantasy.

Is that sort of future too much to ask for?

"ike Wile E. Coyote salivating over a "4000 Ways To Prepare Roadrunner" cookbook without watching his surroundings, the Road Runner of Societal Inertia snuck up on them both and beepbeeped them off the mesa."
--Shem

Look, all I want to do is drive a zero-emission Tesla, stop at a Theranos diagnostic center for some routine bloodwork on my way to work, then go sell real estate on a valuation commensurate with WeWork's market value per square foot. And use my earnings to buy a ticket into space so I can participate in a Space Opera fantasy.

Look, all I want to do is drive a zero-emission Tesla, stop at a Theranos diagnostic center for some routine bloodwork on my way to work, then go sell real estate on a valuation commensurate with WeWork's market value per square foot. And use my earnings to buy a ticket into space so I can participate in a Space Opera fantasy.

Look, all I want to do is drive a zero-emission Tesla, stop at a Theranos diagnostic center for some routine bloodwork on my way to work, then go sell real estate on a valuation commensurate with WeWork's market value per square foot. And use my earnings to buy a ticket into space so I can participate in a Space Opera fantasy.

Is that sort of future too much to ask for?

Do you have a penis?

I bought it off this guy by St. Mark's Place for $17.

"ike Wile E. Coyote salivating over a "4000 Ways To Prepare Roadrunner" cookbook without watching his surroundings, the Road Runner of Societal Inertia snuck up on them both and beepbeeped them off the mesa."
--Shem